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NANOG Meeting Presentation Abstract

Avoiding Nation-State Surveillance

Meeting:

NANOG67

Date / Time:

2016-06-14 2:30pm - 3:00pm

Room:

Imperial Ballroom (B2 Level)

Presenters:

Speakers:

Roya Ensafi

Roya Ensafi is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University. Her research work focuses on computer networking and security, with an emphasis on network measurement. The primary goal of her current research is to better understand and bring transparency to network interference (e.g. censorship) by designing new tools and techniques. In her dissertation, which passed with distinction, Roya developed side channels to remotely measure TCP connectivity between two hosts, without requiring access to any of the hosts. Most of her latest research projects center around studying national firewalls, especially the Great Firewall of China (GFW). Her work studying how the Great Firewall of China discovers hidden circumvention servers received an IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) in 2016. Nick Feamster.

Annie Edmundson, Princeton University

Annie is a Ph.D. candidate in the Security and Privacy Research Group at Princeton University. She is also a Graduate Student Fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy, where she studies computer security and privacy, and its intersection with policy. Her prior work includes research on electronic voting machines and network-level adversaries on the Tor network, as well as being a member of the Application Security team at Twitter.Jennifer Rexford.

Abstract:

When Internet traffic enters a country, it becomes subject to those countries’ laws. As an increasing number of countries pass laws that facilitate mass surveillance, Internet users have more need than ever to determine---and control---which countries their traffic is traversing. To this end, we first conduct a large-scale measurement study to demonstrate that Internet paths often transit countries where laws may make users more vulnerable to surveillance than they would be in their home country. We investigate different options that give users the power to avoid certain countries, which could ultimately make them less vulnerable to state-level surveillance. Our measurement-driven evaluation shows that tunneling allows users in many countries to access many popular sites without traversing certain other countries. Our study focuses on five different countries: Brazil, Netherlands, India, Kenya, and the United States. We find that these different options increase clients’ (end-users’) abilities to avoid other countries, but no country can completely avoid all other countries. Our results also show how central the United States is to inter-domain routing, as clients in Brazil, Netherlands, India, and Kenya cannot avoid the United States when accessing a significant portion of the top domains.